Scheduled Emergency Maintenance?

[Marianka]

How can maintenance be Emergency if people somehow manage to schedule it? Even more so, how come they manage to schedule it in EU prime time 99% of the time?

By now people know that after every major update there will be 3-4 "emergency" updates the fix the update. Of course FFXI is so enormous that it's hard to test everything, but the testing server Atomos is updated at the same time as the "normal" servers meaning that both no regular and no roll out testing has taken place...

[Catsby]

I would like to see a nice presentation that details FFXI development methodology. It's strange to me that SE is making efforts to become more transparent and current gen but still stays so reclusive where they shouldn't be.

[Mirage]

maybe they'd be able to test the updates better if people could make test characters on atomos with 100x exp and 100% drop rate for all items :>. (of course, with periodic character wipes :p.)

[Dazusu]

How can maintenance be Emergency if people somehow manage to schedule it?

"Emergency Maintenance" simply means there is little notice between the scheduling and execution. Usually due to bugs or exploits... Which directly ties in with your observation "after every major update"; but you didn't really want these questions answered did you? You already knew the answer, you just thought you'd troll.

[Marianka]

Actually no. Language is a tool for communication. Some wrds don't belong together, sometimes words are added to clutter sentences and to reduce meaning, or as more likely in this case, to add status. There were 3 points I made:

1) Bad use of language
2) Testing is not thorough
3) EU players get the bad deal every time

[RAIST]

It just an unfortunate side effect of your closer proximity to their normal business hours I guess. NA has gotten the short end of the stick just as much with NORMAL maintenance times that take much longer (and require a lengthy download process afterwards sometimes.

They are already taking steps to lessen some of this though--it is just going to take some time to get it set up. In the coming year, they are going to be opening up a server for us to get on to test new development ideas prior to going live. Read through the roadmap they just released detailing their current plans for FFXI sticky at the top of the Development section):

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/4937-The-FINAL-FANTASY-XI-roadmap-for-the-twelve-month-period-commencing-April-2011

[Tsukino_Kaji]

How can maintenance be Emergency if people somehow manage to schedule it? Even more so, how come they manage to schedule it in EU prime time 99% of the time?Schedules are based around JST prime times, it just leaves otehr SOL by happenstance.

[darkvision]

How can maintenance be Emergency if people somehow manage to schedule it? Even more so, how come they manage to schedule it in EU prime time 99% of the time?

By now people know that after every major update there will be 3-4 "emergency" updates the fix the update. Of course FFXI is so enormous that it's hard to test everything, but the testing server Atomos is updated at the same time as the "normal" servers meaning that both no regular and no roll out testing has taken place...

i think they give you time to log out properly or finish up what your doing.

would you like for them to just boot you off in middle of EXP in abyssea? or a quest that requires you NOT to log/dc/etc or you loose your KI?

and then you log back in booted out of abyssea, possibly dead or wasted time on a little quest and loose all your time?

while i agree Square-Enix DO NEED to spread the maintenance so that it is not always in EU prime time this i will agree on. i hate having to come home to find maintenance happening and by the time its dont i am too tired to even play and head to bed so i can be up anr ready for work the next day.

if you total up the amount of days EU players potentially loose due to maintenance that happens during EU primetime in 1 year, would have around 1-2 months of no game play

its frustrating that they do this while the Japanese playerbase dont suffer as much for effected gameplay during thier prime time hours. how about Square-Enix provide some equal and fair opertunities to the whole playerbase. ther is probably 1 maintenance during japanese primetime to 10-15 maintenances during EU primetime

this needs fixing

[Vold]

if you total up the amount of days EU players potentially loose due to maintenance that happens during EU primetime in 1 year, would have around 1-2 months of no game play
Your math has got to be off. Considering before this year hit.... there was 4 updates per year for 8 hours, once every 3 months, with maybe another 8 hours tops of emergency maint in the coming days after wards. Even if we say your game was down for 100 hours total for maint after every update, that's still only 400 hours in a year. Pretty far cry from 1-2 months, and when you factor in realistically it's more like 60ish hours tops of total down time over all, it's not even 3 days.

So I am going to assume you meant to say days and not months. In which case still, it's 3 days. Out of the entire year. And I know this might be hard to accept but the Japanese don't go unpunished with the maintenance like you think. I'll argue that there is far more JP online at midnight their time when maint happens than anyone else in the world. There just isn't that many euro players, and the NA are off at work or school or whatever when Maint happens. So it's the JP who suffer the most from maintenance for all intent and purposes going by numbers alone.

And if the number of views per post are anything to go by here, the JP far outweigh all of us at like 5 to 1. I'm not surprised in the least they choose to do maint out of their prime time.

[darkvision]

if you think of people that actually has full time jobs and/or kids then that basically takes 1 full day away from thier play time. not everyone can sit online all day every day and play the game, some people have full time jobs to hold down while tending to children, so when you take this into considration. finish work, get home there is maintenance, by the time its over you have to put the kids to bed, once they are settles it might be time to head to bed to be up in the morning for work the next day, so yeah i did mean 1-2 months and not days.

SE already stated that they will be doing more regular smaller maintenance in the future. and tbh some times you cant even download the update till the next day. or unless somone can supply the files that are required for the update you can download. imo SE should just have a manual update procedure where people cn download the update from the website and host it on a few mirrors to ease the conjestion of the update process

[slakyak]

I'm not surprised they don't say much about it if it's to fix an exploit. Not the kind of thing they want to advertise in case people try something similar etc.

It sucks that they have to fix it during peak play times but I guess it's more to do with when the devs are actually there. For me I'd rather have the maintenance at peak times than have it left longer and more people getting stung by a fault or getting an unfair advantage through an exploit.